A video clip showing men clad in the ruling NRM party yellow T-shirts being beaten and scattered by an angry mob, has (as they say these days,) gone viral.
Mob justice in Uganda has been accepted as part of everyday life where a chicken thief can pay the ultimate price with his life. What is not so common though is a group going all out to attack another group of people because their political choices differ. But here we are.
The ruling NRM has led people into temptation. They have always relied on the shamelessly partisan nature especially of the security agencies and government operatives, to show contempt for any form of Opposition. The latest nuisance is what is dubbed the ‘helicopter campaign’ of a retired army officer Lt Gen Henry Tumukunde that was recorded landing at the campaign venue of Opposition pressure group, Go Forward’s Amama Mbabazi. There have been incidences of youth clad in these yellow T-shirts and guarded by the police at venues of rallies of Opposition candidates. Some carry placards of NRM’s Yoweri Museveni while other people dish out money to dissuade people from attending these rallies.
The video clip shows that this time it was the yellow fellows on the receiving end right in front of the police! There is nothing to celebrate about violence irrespective of who it is being meted out on. It is wrong. But it also attests to a stark reality.
To understand that reality, one may need to look at the history of the Sicilian Mafia and all its offshoots. Briefly, it was observed that the whole notion of the State run by law to ensure equity and promote egalitarianism could also be a sham.
A few influential people could use their connections to subvert the law for their own selfish ends, -like the NRM does very often. The concept of equality before the law could be blatantly breached to help those connected to the higher echelons of power to grab land, regulate trade in their favour and immunise them from all forms of persecution-again like is common under the Museveni-led NRM.
The law and officers of the law then looked like a shell that covered illegality and all forms of injustice. The law was then frowned upon with great contempt, as a facade. People then decided to create a regime outside of the law that would help them achieve their own intentions and protect them from the law of the state. They would form a parallel structure with its own term and conditions.
They would bribe, blackmail, use arson, and murder. Thus the Mafia was born to counter the unfairness of the State. In so doing it came up with its own unfairness that has brought a lot of suffering to so many people the world over.
When people take matters into their own hands that is the beginning of a banana republic. Banana republics are characterised by anarchy. The recent unfortunate case of a used car trader who together with his acolytes in the police allegedly tortured a woman to death to force her to pay what she owed them, is a case in point.
When people have no faith in the law and those who enforce it, they create their own enforcement mechanisms. They also sort out their differences without resorting to the courts and other known judicial processes and tribunals.
This is the major consequence of the mustard seed of violence that the NRM has sown over the last 30 years in a bid to suppress others out of political contestation while perpetuating itself.
Trouble is that once violence and lawlessness take root, it becomes an indiscriminate malignant cancer that has no known cure or boundaries. And with time people become emboldened as they take to this resort.
That is why today the violence is being meted out on supporters of the NRM right in front of the police.
Like a snake gives birth to a snake, violence begets violence, only that it comes with the equally dangerous trait of lawlessness.
We have to be scared.
Mr Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues. nicholassengoba@yahoo.com
Twitter: @nsengoba
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